28 years later, WordPad is deprecated by Microsoft in Windows 10 and 11

Classic WordPad to be retired by Microsoft. The company announced on Friday, 1st that the program will be deprecated on Windows in a future system update.

“WordPad is no longer updated and will be removed in a future version of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for text documents like .doc and .rtf, and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt,” Microsoft said in a support message. . page.

WordPad was released in 1995 with Windows 95; so 28 years old. It was a more robust alternative to editing and reading operating system (OS) specific text files.

Over time, the program fell through. It became an optional feature in Windows 10 from Build 19551 in February 2020.

Currently, WordPad is installed by default on Windows 10 and Windows 11. However, you can remove it from the “Optional Features” menu in the operating system settings.

unexpected retirement

Despite the announcement, Microsoft didn’t specify a specific date for WordPad on Windows to end.

It is worth noting, however, that this may not be the definitive end of the program. It was announced by Microsoft in 2017 that classic Paint would also be retired, but after public backlash, Microsoft reversed this decision and has kept the program on Windows until now, including updates.

If the user community requests it, it is possible for Microsoft to adopt a similar strategy and make the program available in the Microsoft Store and maintain continuous updates. But it depends on the company’s strategy.